I’d prefer to have met Strachey’s work first in this book rather than in Eminent Victorians (1918). Then the best would have been still to come. As it was, I first read Eminent Victorians, then sought out more of his work and was disappointed. Victoria (1921) is dull, Elizabeth and Essex (1928) duller.

The Shorter Strachey is much better than those two. Indeed, one short essay on Lodowick Muggleton is worthy to stand beside the long essay on Cardinal Manning that opens Eminent Victorians. This is very good writing:

Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650. Then it was that the disintegration of religious authority which had begun with Luther reached its culminating point. The Bible, containing the absolute truth as to the nature and the workings of the Universe, lay open to all; it was only necessary to interpret its assertions; and to do so all that was wanted was the decision of the individual conscience. In those days the individual conscience decided with extraordinary facility. Prophets and prophetesses ranged in crowds through the streets of London, proclaiming, with complete certainty, the explanation of everything. The explanations were extremely varied: so much the better — one could pick and choose. One could become a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite, a Tryonist, a Philadelphian, a Christadelphian, or a Seventh Day Baptist, just as one pleased. Samuel Butler might fleer and flout at

petulant, capricious sects,
The maggots of corrupted texts;

but he, too, was deciding according to the light of his individual conscience. By what rule could men determine whether a text was corrupted, or what it meant? The rule of the Catholic Church was gone, and henceforward Eternal Truth might with perfect reason be expected to speak through the mouth of any fish-wife in Billingsgate. (“Muggleton”, inPortraits in Miniature, 1931)

Elsewhere, Strachey writes well but not exceptionally on subjects as varied as Voltaire and Frederick the Great, the acting of Sarah Bernhardt, the humour of Dostoevsky, and his own life. He’s witty, perceptive, and, in the autobiographical pieces at least, unblushingly candid. His day-description “Monday June 26th 1916”, in which he longs for a flyweight boxer in the Daily Mirror and tries to realize a daydream of seducing “that young postman with the fair hair and lovely country complexion who had smiled at me and said ‘Good evening, sir’, as he passed on his bicycle”, couldn’t have been published in his lifetime.

Which didn’t last long. It began in 1880 and ended in 1932. There were big changes in those five decades and Strachey was at the heart of some of them. Eminent Victorians was an important book, part of the revolt against the old order provoked by the slaughter and futility of the First World War, but it wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t been so well-written.

You’ll see here that Strachey was rebelling against part of himself: there’s Victorian stodginess in some of the essays and reviews, even if they were written after Eminent Victorians. But “Muggleton” is as light as a soufflé. It’s also affectionate rather than acid. It would have been a foretaste of literary bliss, if I’d read this book first.

I’d didn’t, but you should if you don’t know Strachey. If you do, you’ll learn a lot more about him here. There are also glimpses of others in the Bloomsbury Set, like Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington. And The Shorter Strachey closes with four essays on French literature and culture, which were both very important to Strachey. The French writer Jean Giradoux supplies his epitaph: « Seuls les médiocres sont toujours à leur meilleur. » – “Only the mediocre are always at their best.” Strachey wasn’t mediocre and wasn’t always at his best. But he got there in “Muggleton” and got close elsewhere in this book.

Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock’n’Roll Underworld, Julian Cope (Faber and Faber 2012)

A big book with big ideas about BIIIIIG sounds. As Cope himself might put it. I’d always been vaguely interested in him – what I chanced to hear of his music seemed intelligent, quirky and original – but never bothered to investigate further. But I knew that he liked Krautrock and stone circles, so it was a surprise to pick this book off the shelf and discover that he also liked Pentagram. And Blue Öyster Cult. And Grand Funk Railroad. And Van Halen.

Plus a bunch of obscure stuff. Very obscure. There’s a Danskrocksampler at the end of the book, including Steppeneuvlene’s “Itsi-Bitsi” from 1967. But whether it’s famous or obscure, Cope brings the same enthusiasm and open mind:

The problem with someone like Kim Fowley is that the intellectuals know that, on a long-term, sensible career level, he doesn’t mean any of what he says. So they dismiss him because they’ve fallen for the idea that you gotta mean what you say in the first place for it to have any value. Baloney! The innate truth of rock’n’roll shamanism is such that it can still ooze out and inform the world, even from the works of those who claim to be engaged in nothing more than some kind of parody. (Review of Kim Fowley’s Outrageous, 1967, pg. 32)

The writing is always fun, occasionally fiery, as he explores music from many decades and many genres: rock, heavy metal, doom, drone, glam, psychedelia, and more. There are also a lot of autobiography and digression in it, as he draws parallels between the music and his own life and interests, like landscapes and (pre)history. But I think he uses more words than he needs to. He isn’t writing Guardianese, but he gestures towards it at times. And I think his enthusiasm for weed and magic mushrooms must have led some of his fans into bad places:

Although the double-vinyl artwork is huge, gatefold and magnificent, the CD version of Dopesmoker is the best option overall, because you can get utterly narnered once you’ve put it on and not have to get up for an hour and ten minutes. (Review of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, 2003, pg. 367)

Cope doesn’t spend a lot of his time utterly narnered. Like Vox Day, he’s one of those people who get a lot done and make life more interesting for everyone. Copendium is a good example. Big book, big ideas, BIIIIIG sounds.

Number is all, as the Pythagoreans recognized more than two millennia ago, but number is more obvious in some places than others. When you leaf through this book, you’re leafing through a catalogue of mathematical possibility: the endlessly varying shapes, sculptings, colours and patterns of seashells are in fact governed by evolutionary changes in a few relatively simple variables. The black-spotted, drill-like spiral of Terebra sublata might look very different from the orange-tinged, flattened, scorpion-like Lambis crocata, with its seven curved spikes, but the two species descend from the same ancestor as every other shell on display.

From the same ancestor as shell-less land- and sea-slugs too. But readers should remember that this book is a morgue as well as a museum: rich and beautiful as the shells are, the living animals and their biology are richer and more beautiful still. The living animals are sometimes deadly too: the very beautiful cone-shells have killed humans with their stings.

But the shell remains when the animal is dead, and can be collected and studied in isolation. That’s why almost all of the book is devoted to the more or less snail-like univalves, with the more or less scallop-like bivalves given only a few pages at the end. Generally speaking, univalve shells are much stronger and much more durable. They’re also more varied in both architecture and patterning: anyone who’s played with cascading cellular automata will often find the designs on the shells of cowries and cone-shells startlingly familiar. But they were doing it millions of years before us.

The cowries have a sexual charge too, with their tight, pudendal slits: their generic name, Cypraea, is taken from a title of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. The apertures of other genera gape and glisten even more suggestively, imitating the labia of every human race and many abhuman ones. Is that part of the appeal of shell-collecting? I don’t know, but it doesn’t have to be, because it doesn’t appear in every shell and can’t be seen when the shells in which it does appear are turned over.

And they look better like that: Cypraea caputdraconis (sic), or the dragon’s-head cowrie, looks like unzipped black jeans lying on its back, but like a black, silver-flecked jewel lying on its front. It’s found only on Easter Island too, which is one of the many interesting snippets you can pick up from the short descriptions accompanying each highly skilled illustration.

But the illustrations aren’t, alas, as highly skilled as they could have been: in the reflections on many of them you can see the wooden dividers in the window of the room in which they were painted. That might have been quirkily attractive once or twice, but repeated over and over it becomes irritating. It could have been avoided, or the artist could have set up other reflections: palms, sea-birds, clouds, and even the moon or stars, as though the shells were still lying on a tropical beach.

Fortunately, it affects only the shiny and relatively undistorting surfaces of genera like the cowries and it’s only a minor blemish in a beautifully designed and well-written guide to a fascinating subject. And as always, the scientific names can have an appeal all of their own: we’ve already seen Cypraea caputdraconis, but what about Conus thalassiarchus, the Sea-Lord Cone, or Cirsotrema zelebori, whose meaning I have no idea of?

This book reminds me of the Philip’s Guide to Seashells, because it carries the same important themes: cacti can look very different, but they descend from a single common ancestor and their shape and color are governed by evolutionary changes in a few relatively simple variables.

But there is one big difference between shells and cacti: the shells are dead and don’t change any more; the cacti are living and do. That means that there can be a startling contrast between the vicious spikes or blistering hairs of a cactus, intended to permanently deter, and its beautiful flowers, intended to periodically attract. Notocactus ottonis, for example, is a ridged ball of tough green flesh set with dozens of spikes; its flowers are a beautiful little fountain of yellow petals. Parodia sanguiniflora has even more spikes and even more beautiful flowers: a spray of scarlet petals around a golden heart of anthers and stigma. If the book was scratch’n’sniff, the contrast would because even sharper, because the flowers often smell attractive too.

All of that is adventitious from the human point of view, because the flowers and scent aren’t intended to attract us. But they do, and so do the strangeness and toughness of cacti, which is why a German author has written a highly detailed guide to plants from South and Central America. Some could probably never be grown in Germany, being far too large and demanding even for a specialist greenhouse; others can be grown anywhere with simple equipment.

And once again, as with any sufficiently detailed book about plants or animals, the scientific names have an appeal of their own: Mitrocereus fulviceps isn’t properly illustrated and perhaps could never live up to its name, which means something like “wax-cap tawny-head”, while the name Gymnocalycium horridospinum combines beauty and threat in the way the plant itself does. Its spines are indeed “horrid”, but beautiful violet-pink flowers sprout between them.

The cone-shells provide a similar contrast between beauty and deadliness, but you don’t actually see the deadliness of a cone-shell. However, you need a specialist vocabulary to describe both cone-shells and cacti properly, and both these books will help you acquire one. Being dilettantish, I haven’t put the effort in, but I know I should do, because it would help me to a deeper and richer appreciation of what I’m looking at.

Dog Eat Dog: A Story of Survival, Struggle and Triumph by the Man Who Put AC/DC on the World Stage, Michael Browning (Allen & Unwin 2014)

You know you’re a true fan if your mind flies instantly to AC/DC when you see the title Dog Eat Dog on the spine of a book. Well, actually, you don’t. Because mine did and I’m not. Not any more, anyway. AC/DC used to be one of my favourite bands. Then I realized how much they changed for the worse when Brian Johnson became the lead singer and began to write the lyrics. But Bon-Scott-era AC/DC remained one of my favourite bands.

I can’t say that any more, but I still found this book interesting and entertaining. If Michael Browning really wrote it – no co-author is given – he’s a natural writer, with a relaxed style and excellent ear for dialogue:

That’s George Young, older brother of Angus and Malcolm, and part of the Easybeats, one of Australia’s biggest and most successful bands in the 1960s. That’s how Michael Browning knew him. Browning was at the heart of Australian popular music for decades, booking bands for clubs and watching fashions like the Sharpies come and go.

But he says he wanted to be the first to take an Australian band to big international success. He did it with AC/DC, whom he first met in the B.B. era – Before Bon. Then Bon came on board and the band began its long climb to the top of rock’n’roll. Like Angus and Malcolm, Scott was originally from Scotland. Unlike Angus, he drank and took drugs, which is why he died long ago and Angus is still there. Michael Browning was sacked not long after Bon Scott died, but he saw the Youngs and Scott close-up as AC/DC rose from the pub circuit in Australia to the big time.

He records what he saw here, from AC/DC’s early – and unwanted – popularity with schoolgirls to the flying beer-cans and “Suck more piss!” chants popular with rough Australian crowds, from brawls with Deep Purple’s stage-crew to the “Snot Cyclone” Angus generated after he’d downed too much milk. There are some good photos too, like Angus “showing the poms who’s boss” atop massive speakers in a London club or wearing a Zorro costume on Australian kids’ TV. And the book remains interesting when Browning writes about bands other than AC/DC. Ted Nugent is supposed to have killed a pigeon with his volume; Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs killed an expensive tank of tropical fish.

But the cover of this book speaks the truth: it’s AC/DC that most readers will be interested in. They won’t be disappointed, whether they’re true fans or not. And there’s a lot of sociological interest here too. Australia is an interesting place. So is Scotland. Both countries are part of the AC/DC story and Michael Browning describes how.